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Raymond's Game (One-offs)
A terrorist group was hired by a group of elven refugees to rescue some of their people that had been captured by Goldweaver's Army. The group gathered some intel at Mosstone and slaughtered a couple of maids. The group then traveled to the keep where the Warforged army was stationed... Status *Location: Ryan's media Room *DM: Raymond *PlayersBD1: **Bryce - Nameless Salvator **Landon - Garrote **Ryan - Esum **Paul - Cimaron *Date: December 20, 2011 Set-Up This session will be for level 7 characters. Roll your characters accordingly. The session is set in the same world as the current campaign, in the area of Mosstone. After Goldweaver's forces quieted an elven rebellion some of the elves of the Mosstone region were imprisoned while others fled and now live in exile. The group will be working for these exiled elves to try to free their captured comrades. Your reasons for helping the elves can be whatever you want (Hate for Goldweaver, love of the elves, money, etc.) Starting LootBD2: *Any 1 magic item up to level 10. *Any 2 magic items up to level 5. *2 Potions of Healing *Any mundane equipment or gear that you need *No Gold (d100 rolled at start of session for pocket change) *Ritual Casters will have a total of 7 rituals mastered w/an amount of components necessary to cast each ritual once (Enchant Magic Item: 360gp arcana). Session Review RK1 Refugee Camp The group was hired by some refugee elves to find their friends and return them to the dirty refugee camp. The refugee King knew little(if anything) about the captured elves and was generally worthless in all ways. Deciding to go waste their time elsewhere, the party left for the town of Mosstone. Mosstone Upon entering the town gates, the party had their weapons marked. Garrote(knowing he might need to murder innocents) climbed the town wall to avoid the weapon registration process. Cimaron disguised himself as a large cat to enter without registration. The party made their way straight to the gaol to look for the prisoners. Esum convinced the guard that he was the associate minister of defense from Balder's Gate, and with a bit of intimidation they got to view the prisoners. Seeing only one lonely elf, they decided that this was not the main elf prison and prodded the guard for more info. While the guard himself was useless, Cimaron used the distraction to rummage around in the guard's desk, discovering orders from the local magistrate. Esum went to try his luck persuading his way into an audience with the Magistrate at the town hall, while the rest of the party planned to set a trap at his home. Garrote used his sneaky powers to get in the manor undetected. He hid around and looked for maps or any sort of correspondence in an office. He then murdered some maids in an effort to make searching the house easierPP1. Meanwhile, Cimaron summoned a giant medium toad to distract the guards and let the rest of the party in. The situation quickly degraded as more guards arrived. As Esum headed towards City Hall, he was met by a woman who suggested that enemies of Goldweaver might do well to meet with her friends at a particular building at dusk. As it was still relatively early in the day, Esum used the intervening time trying to convince the secretary at Town Hall to arrange an appointment with the magistrate. Finding himself unable to do so, he opted to meet with the apparent rebels rather than suffer further travails of bureaucracy. He spent the remaining time trying to get a feel for the magistrate's personality through reputation at a nearby bar, where the rest of the party eventually found him after extricating themselves from their ridiculous and ill-conceived boondoggle. The rebels turned out to be sincere and able to provide the party with directions to the prison camp, though unwilling or unable to offer material assistance.BD3 Travel En route to the camp, the party encountered a battle between orcs and warforged. Despite the bard's argument that they should get involved, the party opted to skirt the battle, because known enemies are not as much fun to kill as innocent maids. Also, the party decided to let the evil forces wipe each other out and not risk harm to themselves helping smelly orcs.BD4 Prison Camp The camp consisted of a cleared area surrounding a ruined keep in the woods and was heavily patrolled by warforged. After consulting a local owl regarding the activities on the inside of the keep, it was decided that Esum should distract the patrolling warforged with a Lullaby performance while the rest of the party snuck inside. Despite interference from one of the guards, the plan succeeded and the party entered the camp. Upon entering the walls the party found many more guards, and several titans. Not wanting to fight their way past such staunch opponents, Cimeron threw a grappling hook through a 3rd story window and everyone climbed up. BD5 They explored many empty rooms on that floor, before deciding that the prison was probably in the dungeon. The group sneakily made their way to the bottom floor. They found a closet full of flour, and several rooms full of more guards. Esum attempted to make a bomb out of the flour closet, and they used the old "Bringing prisoners to the jail" routine to sneak past the rooms full of guards. Once in the prison chamber, they tried to kill the warden and take his keys, but failed. The entire party then got trounced by some titans and some archers. They were forced to retreat into the jail cells. BD6 Cimeron summoned a giant medium toad to block the entrance while they the rest of the group tied ropes together to escape down a very nasty looking toilet(also know as "the Poop Chute"). They ushered all the elves down the hole while the battle toad held of the onslaught of metal men. They elves tried to climb back out when they reached the bottom of the rope, but were violently pushed back in by Salvitor. They all fell down the hole to presumed doom. They party quickly climbed into the hole, and through a series of neat rope tricks and some quick acrobatics, reached the bottom of the shit shaft. BD7 PP3 Cave of Failure The elves were found dead in a giant pile of refuse. In a burst of gruesome genius, garrote chopped off the fingers of as many of the rescued elves as he could to use in resurrection rituals at a later time. The party then made their way out of the cave, ran passed some sleeping trolls, and marched back towards the refugee camp. PP4 BD8 Conclusion To embarrassed to give the news to the elves in person, the toad was once more summoned to take a package containing a letter of shame, a bag of fingers, and a beggars share of gold. The party decided it was best to go their separate ways and never speak of this day again. Commentary * RK1 * BD1 **Ray, thanks for DMing! Overall great job for your first time, more details below. **Ryan, I liked the flavor of your bard, but it seemed like you only had one ability(Mockery) Did you use some dailies that I missed? **Landon, I wish you had know your character better. **Paul, I liked your mobility but, as we found out, sliding and pulling isn't really that helpful. Maybe if there had been some hazardous terrain to force the enemies into. * BD2 **I liked the level and amount of loot we started with, it felt as though we had an appropriate number of powers and a reasonable arsenal of magic items * BD3 ** Messing around in Mosstone was actually my favorite part of this mini. However; i think it would have been better, sadly:(, to cut a lot of this part and usher us into the main event.(Purely from a time constraint standpoint). This kind of interaction with people and cities at large is really great in a long campaign, you feel like your action have some other larger effects beyond just the local chaos you cause. But it is really easy to waste a lot of time searching for leads and generally doing nothing, which is something that seems more like wasted time in a mini than a worthwhile investment in a long campaign. ** Splitting the party up caused a lot of chaos for the DM and is generally impossible work with while maintaining the narrative flow for the session. Something that we, as the party, should try to avoid in the future. ** I do feel like Garrote, as an assassin, should have been able to kill those maids without them screaming or alerting anyone ** I liked messing around trying to get into the manor and lay a trap for the magistrate. I was disappointed not to get anything useful from that endevour. I understand that it wasn't one of the things you had considered we might try to do, and maybe it wasn't the smartest way to achieve our goal, but I would have liked to come out of that with a map to the keep or a letter containing some other useful information, like a prisoner manifest or the estimated force protecting the place. If nothing else, some useful amount of gold would have been cool. ** After how hard we fought to try to get something out of the manor, I felt like the rebel person practically threw the location of the prison at us, but wouldn't help in any other way. Not much more useful than a scarp of paper with the same info, maybe we failed some skill check that would have given us more help. It added a bit of flavor to have this NPC, but not much else. ** I felt like getting out of the town was a bit to easy after all the chaos we caused, maybe you were just trying to move us along at that point. * PP1I think the whole maid fiasco was perfectly plausible and realistic. Even though Landon's character is a professional killer, he had to make separate attacks, move from one to the next, they were talking to each other, there was nothing to cover up the noise of the first kill, etc. I think Raymond provided very believable world and realistic consequences over all. * BD4 **This battle between the warforged and the orcs added a lot of flavor to the world, it made our travel more interesting; however, looking back on it, it seems like we really NEEDED to get involved in this fight to get some help at the castle. I wish you had chosen a clear good guy for one of the groups, none of us really wanted either of those faction to win. We really just wanted both sides to die. If you wanted us to get involved you should have used some group of fighters with at least a neutral alignment. I saw this as a fight between lawful evil and chaotic evil, neither outcome was desirable enough to risk my life for. * [PP1 I agree with the flavor statement, which is something travel almost always needs more of. In hindsight, we all saw that this was a crucial mistake on the party's fault not to enlist some extra help, or at least some strategic information on the castle. After having talked with Raymond afterward, I know that we were supposed to have gotten some sympathy/motivation to help the orcs, but since our town activities went so wildly off course, we missed it. I feel like the situation would have still been salvageable from perhaps some specific battle cries from the orcs, maybe something like "We take back our home ugly metalmen!" or whatever. Of course coming up with these kind of clues on the fly is probably difficult, but only being able to compare DM Ray with DM Bryce, it did make Ray's campaign seem a bit more inflexible. Even though Ray planned out many options for us, being able to tweak them at a moments notice seems like a more valuable maneuver to try to prepare for (prepare to improvise?). **At this point, I think you began to get frustrated with us. You announced that we missed a lot of loot. You started telling us how wrong we were doing everything. I really don't like getting this sort of meta information, it interrupts the flow of the story and breaks our feeling of immersion in the world. While we all KNOW we are just playing a game, we can enjoy it by putting that out of our minds for the duration of the session. Info like this really breaks down the fourth wall. Also, when you give out info like this it takes away from our feeling of mystery and freedom. We know that we are doing things the "wrong" way, when there shouldn't be a right or wrong way. We need to be free to pursue whatever path we feel is best, and explore the consequences of that, without knowing in advance that it wont work out for the best. This kind of in game meta-information was my least favorite thing that happened in the session. If I could change one thing about the mini, this would be it. * BD5 **We felt totally overwhelmed by the number(and assumed strength) of the warforged around the castle. If this had been a long campaign I would have wanted to leave and try to find some more help or a secret entrance, but as it stood we didn't have time to do that. I'm glad that the ritual worked well enough to get inside. The inside of the castle felt a little worthless, a lot of empty rooms and nothing interesting, maybe if we looked around more we would have found something. Once we found people we again felt overwhelmed by thier numbers and had to resort to sneaking past them all. If you wanted us to feel in over our heads then good job! if you wanted us to fight some of these people you should have made them seem less daunting somehow. * PP3 This is a good example of the two main things I've said so far, realistic, but a bit inflexible. I was pretty happy with our solution to getting into the castle, although I could tell that we basically found a loophole to make the brute force way of getting in easier with the lullaby. If Raymond had really wanted us to go the cave route (which was seemed to be planned out interestingly with slimes and trolls and a nice variety of stuff) he could have improvised with something in the owl's response, perhaps mentioning a well within the walls, saying that we should ask Mr. Mole if he knows of an underground stream or something like that. * BD6 **You managed to run combat very well, the enemies made their moves quickly and without delay. They seemed to make logical choices in their attacks and positioning. Good Job. **This battle felt a bit drab to me. In fact the earlier manor battle in Mosstone was more interesting. If we had approached it from the front it may have been better, but as it stood we were just backed into a corner trading blows with huge tanky dudes. Everyone was having trouble hitting things. It reminded me of the battle in the snake city were you stood on the bridge and fought the snake men, one of the more boring battles in my campaign(I thought). Some kind of interesting terrain or room features might have helped. * BD7 **This escape was more fun than the fight, I liked holding off the hoard of enemies while everyone got out. **Why would you put a poop shoot in if you didn't have a plan for us to go down it!?? * PP4 **The tragic end to the elf captives was a bit of dark comedy (definitely darker than comedic) and left me with no real sense of accomplishment. All throughout the middle parts of the mini I felt like I was generally "doing good" (if not immediate good then at least preparing to), however the pooey death of nearly forty innocents undid any good feelings I had about what my character had done. I don't know how I would have turned such a long series of missteps (at least in the DM's eyes) into a feelgood ending. It certainly felt realistic and just though. * BD8 **I liked the ending, even though we did not accomplish our goal. I really enjoy that not all paths lead to success. Not that if the party strays off the "right" path they need to auto-fail, but if the actions realistically lead to that end, then failure is good thing. We shouldn't be spoon fed success. Loot